Self-driving systems need lots of power. So do EV motors. That's a problem

It's taken for granted that the autonomous systems being tested right now require a lot of computing power, but it's easy to overlook that all of that computing power comes at a cost of actual electric power. With the coming autonomous future, it's also taken for granted that cars will all be electric or hybrid by then -- Tesla's semi-autonomous Autopilot system is already in a car that's electric -- but much more complex Level 3 through Level 5 systems will also require a lot more computing power to run, putting their requirements at odds with the car's own powertrain system.

How much power are we talking about?

Bloomberg says that current prototypes for fully autonomous driving systems consume the equivalent energy of 50 to 100 laptops, citing supplier BorgWarner. This translates to 2 to 4 kilowatts of electricity, which in a modern car makes it 5 to 10 percent more difficult to meet fuel economy and carbon emission targets.

While this sort of problem can seem to be trivial, or too far in the future, the factor of an energy drain by all of the sensors and computing power is not staying still as governments adopt ever more stringent fuel economy standards. In essence, fuel economy requirements are pulling the engineers of electric and hybrid cars in one direction, while the race towards greater automation is pulling energy demands in another direction.

The solution for now, according to experts Bloomberg spoke with, appears to be gasoline electric hybrids before a big enough breakthrough in battery technology is achieved that will offer plenty of range and autonomous functions for pure electric vehicles. Industry observers expect the very first fully-autonomous cars to be robotaxis rather than commuter cars; te latter will have the luxury of juicing up while their owners are at work or at home, while autonomous taxis will be on the road pretty much the whole time. This means that their energy requirements will easily dwarf those of smaller privately-owned autonomous cars, and absent a huge gain in battery storage capacities it's likely that robotaxis will be gas-electric hybrids.

"They're going to favor plug-in hybrid EVs, and they're going to require that extra gasoline engine, both to extend the range to be able to do a taxi type of duty cycle, but also to help mitigate the proportion of the autonomous systems on the battery pack itself," Sam Jaffe, founder of Cairn Energy Research Advisors told Bloomberg.

For now, automakers like Ford view hybrids as the logical powertrain to be coupled with autonomous tech, also pointing out that pairing autonomous systems exclusively with electric cars is restrictive as a business model. In other words, when it comes to encouraging acceptance of autonomous tech in the marketplace -- a process that is just getting underway -- pairing autonomous tech with electric cars introduces an extra hurdle for automakers. This is why the first truly autonomous cars are likely to be hybrids even though Tesla's Autopilot can seem like an example of the opposite trend. The difference, of course, is that Tesla doesn't have the option of offering a hybrid -- it was an electric car company before it ventured into autonomous driving systems -- and other automakers are not likely to go all-electric for some time.

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